Inventory Boundaries
Updated:
May 28, 2024
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Overview
Inventory Boundaries
Before a company can calculate its carbon footprint, an inventory boundary must be established to determine what is and is not relevant to account for and report on.
Think of a boundary as taking a pencil and drawing a circle around the pieces of the company that need to be included in the emissions report, while excluding the parts that do not.
A company’s inventory boundary consists of two elements: the organizational boundary and the operational boundary.
Organizational Boundary
This includes an approach for consolidating GHG emissions and determining which facilities or operations of the business will be included to calculate the carbon footprint.
Once the organizational boundary is determined, the next step is to define the operational boundary.
Operational Boundary
The operational boundary looks at the facilities and assets included in the organizational boundary and determines which specific emissions sources should be included.
We will dive into the details of inventory boundaries in a separate module that follows later in this series.
